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NATS Monthly - July 2023

📣 News

News or announcements involving NATS.

Want to play a game leveraging only NATS? David Gee presented CyberVet.io at SUSECon ‘23 as part of his presentation “Developing a pervasive telehealth edge with K3S and NATS”.

CyberVet was developed to be fun and engaging, but also to demonstrate how all of the NATS features can be leveraged including messaging, streaming, KV, and object store, and leveraging nats.ws in the browser. Players will be connected based on availability, otherwise a bot will be spawned to play against you.. all leveraging NATS for comms under the hood.

Look out for the published video where David provides a brief walkthrough of the presentation and game! Big shout out to Delaney Gillian from Synadia who developed the frontend (including all the art) for the game!

🫶 Engage

Opportunities for engagement on NATS preview features, new projects, and Synadia products.

The first release candidate of the NATS 1.0.0 Helm Chart is now available! Check out the blog post for the motivation and high-level changes. Engage with the team by opening issues or starting discussions on the nats-io/k8s repo or asking questions in the #k8s NATS Slack channel.

The new JetStream client API is near GA! In case you missed last month’s newsletter, we asked for feedback on the new JetStream client API introduced in this blog post. We had a lot of constructive (and positive 🙌) feedback from the community, so thank you to all who participated in the last few weeks. While we finalize the bits and bobs across clients, please check out the available examples and feel free to ask questions in the #jetstream NATS Slack channel.

Beta docs for the NATS protocols. Incremental work has been going into a brand new NATS documentation site. This is still, very much, a work in progress, but incremental feedback is invaluable so we want to share what we have to continue improving!

The four main areas to review include:

If you have any questions or feedback please post in the #improving-docs NATS Slack channel!

Exploring Synadia Developer Education. , we shared a questionnaire that would help us better understand how NATS users want to learn (feel free to fill it out if you haven’t). The response has been very informative and we appreciate everyone who contributed!

Here are the high-level takeaways:

  • Although there was a spectrum of preferences, the majority of respondents indicated a preferred learning style including a brief video introducing the topic and written steps to follow an exercise.

  • Another informative result is that a browser-based medium was a strong second as the medium for learning, but the majority of responses indicated they prefer to be able to work through exercises in their preferred (local) environments.

  • There was a strong signal for the ability to achieve some level of “NATS practitioner” competency. Although folks have mixed feelings about the value of certifications, no one can argue with the value of learning, understanding, and applying concepts effectively.

  • An overwhelming majority of folks requested some form of workable example per lesson and assessment per module in order to validate understanding.

  • Unsurprisingly, nearly every respondent would value a dedicated Slack channel for learners to ask questions of the Synadia team.

  • Finally, the uncomfortable, but necessary question of “would you pay for this service and, if so, how much?” The majority of respondents were willing to pay a minimum of $9/month for a subscription while others preferred to pay one-time per-module. Pricing is tricky especially when considering the utility of the content over time as new NATS versions are released, possibly introducing new content for existing modules.

😅 That was a lot, but we wanted to keep our promise and share our findings. As always, if you have any questions or feedback, please let us know in the #synadia NATS Slack channel (or in the comment section of the questionnaire itself).

🎬 Media

Audio or video recordings about or referencing NATS.

📖 Articles

Blog posts, tutorials, or any other text-based content about NATS.

⚡ Releases

Official releases from NATS repos and others in the ecosystem.

⚙️ Projects

Community created projects, integrations, or discussions in the NATS ecosystem.

🧑‍🎓 Resources

New or updated official learning resources, such as docs, screencasts, and examples.

💬 Discussions

NATS repositories having recent GitHub Discussions.

nats-server

nats.go

nats.rs

nats.net

nats.java

k8s